


Memories and Keepsakes - [Challengers S02W02]

by keira_irl, Lorostan, Skairunner, TheCauldronDiscord, Zacatigy



Series: Challengers - Season 2 [2]
Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-30
Updated: 2018-07-30
Packaged: 2019-06-18 14:18:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 1,825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15487716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/keira_irl/pseuds/keira_irl, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lorostan/pseuds/Lorostan, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skairunner/pseuds/Skairunner, https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheCauldronDiscord/pseuds/TheCauldronDiscord, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zacatigy/pseuds/Zacatigy
Summary: A compilation of entries for Season 2 Week 2 ofthe Cauldron Discord's Challengers event, in which participants must write a snippet or oneshot corresponding to a given thematic prompt.The theme:Memories and KeepsakesRestrictions:100 to 500 words





	1. Memories - by @keira#7829

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Author:** @keira#7829 - [AO3](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sylae), [Spacebattles](https://forums.spacebattles.com/members/keira.355153/)
> 
>  **Focus:** OC

In my hands was a doll. I’d had it since I was a little girl. A stuffed plushie Alexandria. At some point, maybe it would’ve been worth something, if I’d kept it in a box, mint condition. A collector’s piece.

It wasn’t that. The opposite, really. Her arms had fallen off multiple times, her cape lost to the tumble-dryer of time a decade ago. That made the stupid doll so much more valuable, in my eyes. It didn’t smell like cotton and polyester fill, it smelled like childhood. Running around playing superhero in the woods during summer vacation. Riding around on my bike with her in the front basket. Lemonade stands and first days of the school year. Eventually, I’d gotten older, moved on, and she’d been relegated to a spot on my dresser. Kids made fun of you when you carried around a doll as a teenager.

Work was buzzing about something that’d happened over in Brockton Bay. The fight that everyone had underestimated. It was above the security clearance of me, a mere intern, but people had a tendency to forget I was there. Whatever had happened, she’d been involved, and not in a good way.

Did that make her a monster? A crook and a liar? I wasn’t sure. To be honest, I’d never thought of Alexandria as the cape who battled Endbringers and lead the Triumverate. She’d never be that to me.

I smiled sadly, setting the doll back on the dresser, next to my mirror. No, Alexandria wasn’t a hero. Nor was she an inspiration, a force of nature, a guiding lighthouse in the darkness. She was more than that.

She was a lonely girl’s best friend growing up, and nothing would ever change that.


	2. Untitled - by @Sky#2808

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Author:** @Sky#2808 - [AO3](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skairunner), [Spacebattles](https://forums.spacebattles.com/members/skyrunner.360175/)
> 
>  **Focus:** OC

One of the few personal touches I'd added to my government-issue Safe Harbor apartment was a little box, covered with blue imitation velvet and hinged, sitting in a place of honor on top of the shoddy dresser all of the apartments came with. A gift from my girlfriend. Sarah, or Rampant. Inside the box sat a palm-sized shard of exotic metal, tinker-origin, matte white and shaped like the diamonds suit of a card. Like ice to the touch: cool and frictionless, and my finger came away feeling like I'd dipped it in water, but it was always dry. She had torn a panel off some hero's heat gun and kept it until my hot, late-July birthday.

"That's surprisingly careless of you," I'd said, stroking the metal. "Trackers and stuff."

"Don't give me that," she shot back. "You know I checked for that, and I know you know this."

"What did happen to him? What was his name?"

"Heatmaker. Full recovery, three weeks."

"That's goo--" I hissed as I cut my finger on the sharp edges.

"Pressure," she ordered, producing gauze from somewhere. I did as she said. "You have to be careful."

"I'm sorry. Thank you. And for the gift."

She smiled tightly. "Don't go killing yourself on it."

"I'll try not to."

One of the biggest missions we'd pulled off, as a team of us two and two others. We were going places, or so we thought. Then Golden Morning happened, and then it was just me in an empty, one-person apartment, built to house the teeming, displaced masses from Earth Bet et al. With a blink, I realized I had cut my finger again. A drop of chilled blood rolled down my skin.


	3. A Mother watches as the heroes call the day of her daughter's death a good day - by @Lemon Boy#3637

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Author:** @Lemon Boy#3637 - [Spacebattles](https://forums.spacebattles.com/members/lemonboy.362497/)
> 
> **Focus:** Alexandria's mother

Nails dug into the cheap, flimsy plastic as she heard the words for the tenth time as the television played. 

"She was a traitor." 

They were words that should've brought tears to her eyes, yet there were no tears to shed now; she had shed all that she could when she learned the diagnosis all those years ago. 

Cancer. 

Untreatable. 

Terminal. 

Yet the vast, gnawing emptiness that had consumed her back then when she was told that the chemotherapy wasn't working anymore was one of the few things accompanying her now in place of a daughter. Hugging her tight and smiling as it pushing back all the grief and sadness into a pit that had no beginning and no end. 

Despite the emptiness though, the grief threatened to come to the fore as she heard the words spoken by someone who had once fought alongside her daughter. The man who had helped her bring down the monsters that destroyed cities and save countless lives. 

Now calling her the monster and sullying her name with words more befitting of the girl who stood at the stage. 

Threat. Corrupt. Blame. Betrayed. Blame. 

She wanted to have the strength to look at the face of the woman who had murdered her daughter through the TV screen, at the so called hero who stood beside the killer of her only child, yet she couldn't do it. Instead, she took to staring at the only thing she had left of Rebecca. The broken, cheap, dinky orange toy that she had kept despite throwing away everything else when the cancer had disappeared and she came home. 

She didn't understand why she had kept it. There was no value to it, material or sentimental. It was the type of toy that came in those boxes of fast food and was meant to be forgotten a day later, thrown in the trash after the meal was done and the toy played with for a precious few seconds. But she hadn't thrown it away, and now it was the only thing she had left of her daughter. 

It was the only thing that kept her from breaking down and crying as she heard the last word uttered from the mouth of a man who should've supported her name against the people who spat on it. 

Victim. 

It was all her little girl had ever been. 

The cancer, the power, the responsibility, the Simurgh, the villain and now the media. 

The world took every chance it could to deprive her of the life she deserved and she had fought so hard, so bravely, and yet it hadn't been enough. It wasn't fair. She'd deserved better. 

She deserved so much more than having the day of her death being called a good day. 

Her little superhero deserved better.


	4. Memento Mori - by @Miscellaneous Uncertainties#3263

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Author:** @Miscellaneous Uncertainties#3263 - [AO3](https://archiveofourown.org/users/zacatigy), [Spacebattles](https://forums.spacebattles.com/members/zacatigy.389503/)
> 
> **Focus:** that one cape who got pregnant with his dead teammates

I cradled the box close enough to my chest that I could feel the splinters where the wooden container had fractured and split. I held it closer anyways, using my hands to cover the places where the walls of the box gaped open - uncaring about the splinters I didn’t feel against my burned and blackened hands as I tried to hold the ash within the confines of the box. 

Beyond the ruins of the living room, I could hear the screaming. The others, who had left when we had first heard about the battle between the Cartel and the Insurgents, about the non-cape weaponry both sides had brought in. They had ran out, while I had ran in, to collect my mother’s ashes.

I could hear them now, though they no longer sounded like themselves. I couldn’t reach them. My legs had long since stopped sending feeling, after the explosions had torn apart the house.

I held the remnants of my mother closer to my heart, whispering the prayers she had told me long ago to wish luck upon those who you have shared bread and wine, even as I knew her ash smeared upon my fingers and stained my soul with the act.

I knew I would not be leaving.

I weeped instead for the others, The ones who had so much longer to live than I, who were outside where I could no longer reach them and bring them to safety. I wept for my son, only just become a man, whose screams I could no longer hear.

I clutched the box close to my chest, and wept that I did not have the strength to carry them forward, as my mother had carried me.

\---

The splintered box stood pristine in it’s burns and soot on it’s place at the center of the mantle piece. I smiled even now at the resting place that had carried my mother for so many years.

It was empty now, only the faintest traces of ash still coating it’s bottom. Now I carried Mother within me, as I had all the others after they too had left, and as I still did for those who had been too far gone when I had arrived.

I smiled, as I stroked the box and remembered, for they had not been abandoned. They lived on within me.

Even as the fragile box lay cold and empty on the mantle, the warm embrace of family remained with me.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Author Notes:**  
>  Ok, hot hells what did I just write. So this is the cape who taylor found as “pregnant with their dead teammates. Set it up so he was an older father, and his trigger was hearing his son and friends die outside where he couldn’t reach them, broken as he was. Gains the ability to hold the “souls” of those who die or he knew had died nearby, along with the ability to keep going if he is holding them (minor regeneration. For those that die next to him, he can bring them back. For those that die before he reaches them, his power makes a sort of bad copy of their brain, and if that is too deteriorated the copy stays with him until his power merges the copy into his brain which he things of as them ‘coming to peace’. He can do the same for people that died a long time ago that he knew, only the copy is based off of what he thought of the person.


	5. Piggot's Office - by @Lorostan#0595

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Author:** @Lorostan#0595 - [AO3](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lorostan)
> 
>  **Focus:** Director Emily Piggot

Director Emily Piggot of the PRT East-North-East division wasn’t known for being a woman of many personal effects, but everyone has things they need to remember, and things to help them remember those.

Director Emily Piggot kept, mounted on the wall opposite her desk her PRT acceptance letter and her old officer badge. Those were reminders of her better days, from before misfortune had landed her on the chair of director. The acceptance letter reminded her of a younger Emily, one that the director would have called an idealist. The decommissioned badge reminded her of her finest moments on the field, and of many of her worst. But not  _ the _ worst.

Emily Piggot kept, on top of papers in a drawer on her desk, a PRT Purple Heart medal awarded for injury in combat. Lost kidneys, gnawed legs. That one, yes, was a reminder of her worst day - though not the only one. More convenient than hemodialysis, certainly. On the first drawer, looking at it served to make her remember on the most tiring of days why she had stayed behind that desk after all those years: there needed to be people to keep the heroes in line, to remind them of their own jobs. Ellisburg had taught her how easily they could forget their duties, otherwise.

Emily kept, on the last drawer, a single silver ring. It had been an engagement gift from her fianceé, right after she returned home from her last field mission. It had been intended as a reminder that he’d still be here for her, no matter what happened. He had been wrong - he did leave, after she’d lashed out at him for all that happened to her. Drove him out. She regretted it afterwards, of course, but the things she said couldn’t be taken back. For her, it was a reminder that she had lost more along the way than just pieces of flesh.

Director Emily Piggot of the PRT East-North-East division kept those things and some others more - things from her grandfather, her sister, her nephew - but tonight those are the ones worth mentioning. Tonight, she has to pack all of her personal belongings away from her office.

Tomorrow, it wouldn’t be hers anymore.


End file.
